With playful touches of Spielberg, Shyamalan and even Hitchcock, veteran director Joe Dante has confected a neat little scary movie, not explicitly violent, but pretty scary nonetheless, and audaciously pitched at a young market: it has a 12A rating here. Chris Massoglia is Dane, a moody teenage boy who resents having had to move to a boring neighbourhood with his stressed single mom (Teri Polo) and his annoying little brother Lucas (Nathan Gamble). Things look up for Dane when he befriends pretty girl next door Julie (Haley Bennett) and soon all the kids are investigating a weird mystery: their new house has a strange hole in the cellar floor, covered with a wooden trapdoor, secured with padlocks. The resourceful youngsters unlock it and stare, perplexed into the creepy blackness: to test its depth, they drop in some nails and wait for the clatter: silence. Dante wittily controls their reactions – and our reactions – as the kids come to terms with the realisation that their house contains a portal into hell itself. It's the kind of knockabout, kid's-eye-view comedy-horror that hasn't been made for a while, with some nasty, frightening touches, but expertly encased in a distinctive family-movie aesthetic.